I am not "proud" that my text was used from the press release. I was astonished, in fact. I was surprised that the text was clearly lifted totally from the press release, which is considered simply lazy editing.

Normally, in journalism, an editor re-writes a product's press release even for use in a "New Products" section, partly to remove any hyperbole and to keep the style of a magazine.

Wow tough critics here. Its apparent most of the critics haven’t read our criteria for this type of award. It's not based on us reviewing the gear. No we haven't yet reviewed the EP800 but I did get a chance to hear it at my last On-Location tour and I liked what I heard.

The Audioholics Consumer Excellence award is based on manufacturers submitting their entries and my review staff reviewing the submitted entries and comparing products of each genre with respect to features, value and product purpose. EHX, CEDIA, CNET and many other magazines/organizations do the very exact thing only they aren’t as upfront about it as we are.

We do have a Product of the Year award as well which is based on staff picks of what we felt were the best products we reviewed that particular year.

As for Alan's comments about us being lazy lifting his text, perhaps you should blame Peter Bell or Ian for providing us the product summaries and details during the entry process which we used to post the winners for.

If Axiom and others aren't happy with us picking their subwoofer for the award, we can very easily retract it if that makes everyone feel better.

I wrote about 70% of this article since most of the manufacturers didn't provide the info we required and I had to dig for it. I thought I did edit and summarize the info that was supplied by Axiom. They supplied a lot of details relating to the product which was really convenient for me. I will go an edit the text to make it CLEAR that their claims are not verified by us.

Honestly I thought by now people could differentiate between our typical 5-10k word reviews with measurements compared to a 2-3 sentence for a promo that we gave an award to. I guess its bad to make assumptions.

Thanks for the insight, Gene. For the record, I wasn't being critical at all, just merely pointing something out.

I will say that I do have respect for you guys (not that I didn't before) after reading your review of the Lexicon BD-30 and pointing out that it is a shell around the Oppo BDP-83; a very truthful review. Especially since I just stumbled across this review of the exact same player. Only difference is, they apparently aren't being truthful, giving it accolades and deeming it worthy of its inflated price, which clearly is just for the name.

Wow, I would have made sure to explain what the CE awards meant in the first post if I’d realized no one knew or didn‘t understand the lead-in to the article. And here I though I needed to get out more.